Author: cristiano

Today I was preparing some video material for upload onto the Azure Media Services portal. Since MXF format is not supported as source for Azure Media Services I did transcode it with ffmpeg. I uploaded the videos but every encode job would fail with this error

Encoding task
UserInput : File type or codec not supported.

I checked again and again:

mp4 container: supported

aac audio, various profiles: supported

h264 video, various profiles: supported

But every encode task would fail. It turns out that ffmpeg encodes video in a 4:2:2 bitplane format by default but Azure supports only 4:2:0. By adding the option-pix_fmt yuv420p
the the ffmpeg command line Azure encodes the videos resulting without any issue

Focus here is not how tho setup a LTSP infrastructure but how to build a LTSP image to be used as a thin client for VMware Horizon View. PXE, tftp NBD is not discussed here.

We use the standard LTSP setup process, since this is the fastest way to get up and running . You need also to download the vmware linux view client. Some steps could contain errors, but you can use this as a guideline. I used 12.04 LTS for the ltsp image and 14.04 for the server.

You should get an output similar to this one and I did choose those options:
Smart Card(The Smart Card component enables Smart Card device
redirection from your local computer to the remote desktop.) [yes]: no

Real-Time Audio-Video(The Real-Time Audio-Video component allows you
to use local computer's webcam or microphone on the remote desktop.)
[yes]: no

Virtual Printing(The Virtual Printing component allows you to use
local or network printers from a remote desktop without requiring that
additional print drivers be installed in the remote desktop.) [yes]: no

The product is ready to be installed:
USB Redirection
PCoIP
Horizon Client

#!/bin/sh
#
# The following script works for LTSP5 and was tested in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Linux.
# Original rdesktop script by James A. McQuillan,
# modified for LTSP5 by Colin Osterhout of SERRC (www.serrc.org).
# modified for VMWare View Open Client by
# Mikael Fridh
#
# This software is licensed under the Gnu General Public License.
# The full text of which can be found at http://www.LTSP.org/license.txt
PATH=/bin:$PATH; export PATH
. /usr/share/ltsp/screen-x-common
if [ -x /usr/share/ltsp/xinitrc ]; then
xinitrc=/usr/share/ltsp/xinitrc
fi
mkdir /home/view/
cp /etc/vmware/.xinitrc /home/view/
chown -R view /home/view/
su - view -c "xinit" >/dev/null

At work I was trying to integrate shibboleth with with gitlab, with lots of issues. I followed the guide https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/integration/shibboleth.md but it wouldn’t work:

In the last days I was working on a VDI deployment with Horizon View and AppVolumes. I had the need to be able to programmatically refresh the Start Menu/Start Screen. The problem is that sometimes when an AppStack is mounted the start menu won’t display the shortcuts to the applications in the AppStack and a user can’t launch them form the start menu.

I execute this code via GP and this causes a refresh of the start menu, displaying all new links. Here is the downlodable RefreshStartMenu.exe application, use it at your own risk 😀

In the last month I was plagued by a Addressbook problem on one of my macs. No matter what, only about 500 of my over 1000 contacts where syncing on my Mac Pro. I have tired many times to disable and re-enable the contacts, to export all the contacts on the only mac where my contacts were complete, empty the address book and reimporting the contacts, but with limited success. Some corrupt contact was blocking my Mac Pro form syncing.

X-MS-OL-DESIGN was a starting clue so I exported again all contacts in vcf and opened the file in a text editor to find which ones had the X-MS-OL-DESIGN property. The idea was to edit them, and remove the offending property. But first I wanted to check if this was really the cause of my problems. So every time I found a contact with the X-MS-OL-DESIGN property I copied it into a secondary iCloud account that I created years ago and deleted it from my primary account. After removing all entries with the X-MS-OL-DESIGN property, I was able to sync all remaining contacts on the Mac Pro. Moreover, by moving the offending contacts to the secondary account, the offending property was gone, and I was able to move them back in the primary account and they where synced perfectly.

Some buddy of mine is using PVS in a university to manage the students PC. They are serving the images out of raid mirrors of Intel DC S3500 SSDs to reduce the number of spindles installed on the Citrix PVS servers. It’s a cost efficient solution and since they don’t need to host the write cache, read optimised SSDs are best suited for this task.

Over time more and more images have been created for serving different hardware and use cases totaling about 650 GB of used space on the SSD mirrors. Space started to run low so they decided to enable deduplication on the 2012 R2 PVS servers. Since there is almost no write activity on the disks, fear of write amplification caused by deduplication is not a real issue. The VDI optimised dedup was chosen even if there is no write activity, but due to the similarity of workloads and due to the fact that this way it’s possible to deduplicate also open files. No background deduplication is taking place and there is a single dedup schedule taking place during the night when images are usually not served.

Space usage went down from 650 GB to 77 GB, impressive but expected, PVS images have great similarity also across different operating system versions. This setup is now in test phase and if no issues arise, deduplication will also be deployed in the remaining PVS servers.